Background
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Pfister graduated from Norwood High School in Norwood, Ohio in 1973,. [1] With the help of a Charlotte Schmidlapp Honor Scholarship, she studied Fine Arts at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1977 and doing graduate work from 1979 to 1980, before proceeding on to post-graduate photographic work at the Parsons School of Design in New York. After moving to London, she studied printmaking during a fellowship at the Slade School of Fine Art and fine art post-graduate work at Saint Martins School of Art, earning a Post Graduate Diploma in Art at the latter.
She lectured at The American School In Switzerland from 1985 to 1990, Bath School of Art and Design from 1990 to 1995, and at City of Westminster College, London from 1992 to 1996; and served as Co-Head of the Third Year Degree Programme at Chelsea College of Art from 1993 to 1994.
Pfister (who initially painted under her married name of Diane Epstein) worked commercially in various media—including collage, photography and sculpture—for book jacket and poster illustration before committing herself to painting in 1995.
Return to the U.S.
Pfister returned with her family to the United States in 2006, and now lives in Cincinnati, where she maintains a studio at the Pendleton Art Center.
Since relocating with her family to her native country in 2006, Pfister has mounted the exhibition "Painting is Soundless Poetry" at the Good News Gallery in Woodbury, Connecticut. Here she unveiled two more series, "Source Energy" and a series of "Kimono" triptychs, which interested Pfister for the "independent picture plane a kimono creates on the human body." In notes provided to the exhibit, she continued "The East found it more important to ignore the surface of the body, while the West obsessed with the figure. It is the difference between the diaphanous, transcendental and intellectual, versus the worldly and secular. It is my hope that viewing these works may trigger in others the sense of floating in that space."
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